Paper Two

Q: In a period when all American women were negotiating behavior and self-presentation between older ideals of domesticity and newer ideals of independent womanhood, how did some black women and some immigrant women and their allies counter the dominant culture’s demeaning significations and make claims for different representations?

European immigrant and Black women alike ascribed dominant representations of womanhood in order to negate formerly demeaning images. Both groups did this through their participation in the America’s capitalistic pillars of consumerism and entrepreneurship.
A prime example of European immigrant women negating hegemonic perceptions through consumerism and entrepreneurship lies in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers. As soon as the first chapter, the reader is introduced to Mashah Smolinksy and her well-known buying habits: “‘Give a look only on these roses for my hat’” (Yezierska 2). Through her purchases, the reader sees how Yezierska is hinting at Mashah’s femininity. Mashah does not merely look for roses for her hat but she also seeks other trimming for it and gloats about how such details make her look like the women on the cover of the magazines, just as Historian Kathy Peiss points out in her argument about female consumers during this time. Clearly Mashah’s purchases must be serving their purpose since Yezierska describes how the men “follow her with melting looks” (Yezierska 4).
Mashah’s consumerism follows another observation made in Peiss’s article, “Making Faces.” In the article, Peiss describes how early beauty cosmologists like Susanna Cocroft made claims that being beautiful meant being hygienic. In Bread Givers Mashah’s beauty comes off as superior to the other sisters in the house as she is the only one who takes her earnings to buy her own personal toothbrush and her own snow white towel. Such purchases make Mashah come across as more modern and therefore more “American.”
While Mashah consumes the home’s income depletes which gives Sara the motivation to start her entrepreneur initiatives. She counters demeaning notions of European immigrants when she chooses to sell fish instead of merely begging for money: “‘I’m no beggar!’ I cried. ‘I want to go into business like a person. I must buy what I got to sell’” (Yezierska 21). After selling the fish for a while, Sara reinforces how her entrepreneurial activity affirms her Americanness: “Earning twenty-five and sometimes thirty to fifty cents a day made me feel independent, like a real person” (Yezierska 28).
Eventually growing frustrated with her oppressive father, Sara leaves her abode only after she articulates her new-found independence in which she sees that “in America women don’t need men,” (pg. 137) and that she is no longer “from the old country” because she is “American” (Yezierska 138). Through her rejection of her foreign heritage, Yezierska makes Sara more palatable to the dominant culture.
Black women, too, were countering hegemonic ideas of their culture through consumerism and entrepreneurship. One example is Madame C. J. Walker and her manufacturing company – making cosmetics for just Black women. During a time when whites “had symbolically linked the supposedly ‘natural’ inferiority of Blacks to an appearance marked by unruly, ‘kinky’ hair and slovenliness in dress,” (Peiss 383) Madame Walker countered such negative ideas of Black women by making products (and also a business) which improved Black women’s appearances and their chances of participating in entrepreneurship. By having straight, smooth hair Black women wore an “external maker of personal success and racial progress, signifying a response to the white denigration of Black womanhood” (Peiss 393).
Through consumerism and entrepreneurship, women of all ethnicities could have a hand in making themselves more “American,” and therefore more palatable to the dominant culture in order to provoke different representations of their culture.


Please leave comments regarding additional examples since this paper is wayyyyy too short!